Data Hoarder
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
Amazon sales and prime day and Black Friday are all totally bogus except for a few specific loss leader deals. Everything else is on sale based on marked up prices
I highly recommend the Keepa extension on chrome or the like (camel camel camel, etc.)
Here is their chart for the last year (US pricing) - https://i.imgur.com/pKoSanC.png
Thanks for the recommendation, mate. I didn't know it was a thing, really appreciate it.
Wonder what caused the spike in March.
Someone said "oh crap my HDD crashed I got purchase a new drive yesterday" and paid whatever they were charged and just accepted it.
That's the "actual price". It's been on "sale" for 95% of the time. I wouldn't be surprised if they legally have to sell it at it's actual price at least some of the time.
Wouldn't they lose money by always having it include a discount?
No, the scare quotes are there for a reason. They've determined that the most profitable price point is at $300, but they want to advertise "50% off!" without actually lowering the price, so they raise the price to some ridiculous number for as short as legally possible, then claim that it's the "real" price and say that $300 is discounted.
It's just lying, and it's illegal in many jurisdictions. For example, Dell recently got fined $10,000,000 in Australia for advertising "was $x, now $y" discounts when $x was not the price for the majority of the product's recent availability.
Keepa is a keeper
I love Keepa
Love how many things do this especially on Amazon. Stores have been doing it for years.
My gf falls for it a lot. I remind her it's not the crazy deal she thinks it is. No, it's not 50% off. It's only 7 dollars cheaper than it's average selling price over the last couple months.
No, it's not 50% off. It's only 7 dollars cheaper than ~~it's average selling price over the last couple months.~~ the marked up price, which is still overall more expensive than it was 2 months ago, and more expensive than it will be in 2 months from now when the "deal" has finished.
FTFY.
Even if it grows, if you found a good deal on Black Friday you just get it because the price is good nothing else.
Pump and dump!
I've been looking at drives on ServerPartDeals the past few months, bought a few the past few months, and noticing a similar trend. Got 1 18TB recertified for $165, then a month later got two for $175, now they're up to $199.
They probably have a price bot/algorithm that tracks prices elsewhere and adjusts their prices to trend the same.
I got my exos 2x18 for 180, it's 280 now.
In my experience the actual sales are in January to mid-February.
Sometimes there are random decent 'sales' around black Friday/cyber Monday. Those are usually targeted towards people shopping for Christmas presents, so there's really only a few good deals.
Then the prices skyrocket for Christmas because everyone that waited until last minute to get Christmas presents will be price gouged.
Finally, in January - mid-February, they actually get rid of old stock. This is a great time to buy things where there's a newer model, usually things like laptops and RAM kits.
Main difference these days IMO is that you just don't buy stuff around Christmas online unless you need it, especially technology stuff. They price gouge it like gas in the summer.
They are raising it so they can drop it back to normal for BF sale.
And raise it back to the increased price after BF. BF is a blessing for businesses.
thinking a general price increase in all tech, e.g. ram, hdd and ssd starting september/october just so they can drop it all the way back to those prices for black friday is delusional lol